about thread & circuits

Thread & Circuits is the archive for Worse Than Queer (1997-2004), old Punk Planet columns, Maximumrocknroll essays, and other fanzine detritus.

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war and its afterlife (Duke University Press, forthcoming). She is also co-editor with Fiona I.B. Ngo and Mariam Lam of a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique on Southeast Asians in diaspora (2012).

With her second project on the obligations of beauty, she continues to pursue her scholarship through the frame of transnational feminist cultural studies, and in particular as an untangling of the liberal way of war that pledges “aid,” freedom, rights, movement, and other social goods. She is co-editor with Thuy Linh Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007) and publishes on queer subcultures and punk feminisms.

She also publishes at Threadbared, a collaborative blog on the politics of dress and beauty. You can contact her at 475mimi at gmail. For more, see her site.

ALTERNATE I.D.

I’m a punk rock expatriate who still can’t manage to get away. When I was a teenager I used to stare at blurred photographs of leather-clad punk rockers rioting in the streets, their arms in mid-motion throwing or breaking, the pin-ups of my suburban daydreams. Now I sigh (deeply) for theory and persons who can impress me with their critical acumen. If I’m lucky, they used to be the punk rockers too.

I made my first zine in 1990. I’ve made many more since, most notably the compilation zines Race Riot. I’ve done some version of this on-line since 1997. Ask me why and I’ll quote Michel Foucault, who once said:

Your question is: why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer you very simply, I would say this: Why shouldn’t I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence…. The essence of our life consists, after all, in the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves.